1819–1900 · English art critic, draughtsman and social reformer
Ruskin was the most influential art critic of Victorian Britain — the champion of Turner and the Pre-Raphaelites, author of Modern Painters and The Stones of Venice — who then turned the same moral scrutiny on the economy. He argued that the discipline of political economy had never properly defined its central word, wealth, and that any definition worth having would have to be measured in human lives rather than in stock. The four essays he wrote to make that case were furiously unpopular at the time and became, within a generation, some of the most quoted social criticism in English.